Columbine

by Dave Cullen

For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

This is exactly the sort of false apology Dr. Cleckley identified in 1941. He described phony emotional outbursts and dazzling simulations of love for friends, relatives, and their own children—shortly before devastating them. Psychopaths mimic remorse so convincingly that victims often believe their apologies, even from a state of ruin. Consider Eric Harris: months after his massacre, a group of experienced journalists from the top papers in the country watched him perform on the Basement Tapes. Most reported Eric apologizing and showing remorse. They marveled at his repentance.

I didn’t cry April 20. Work takes over—got to keep your head in the game. I was not even aware of it, until Wednesday afternoon, when the tears suddenly came. I included a brief account of the event that set them off in chapter 20. A shriek rang out, everyone ran toward it, and we found Rachel Scott’s friends in a semicircle around her car. The bodies were still in the school. Nowhere to mourn properly, nothing to mourn with. So they decorated her car with candles and flowers, and heartbreaking messages soaped on the windows. An odd thought hit me: Death rituals, I’ve misjudged you. Open caskets, funerals, tombstones—I never liked any of that. But I’d never tried to mourn without them. These girls needed something, a physical object with a Rachel connection to direct their grief. They found her car. They made a little shrine. And then I felt the wave swell, out of nowhere, and I ran for it before my peers could see me fall apart. I ducked behind the phalanx of TV semitrailers that had materialized overnight. I dropped to the asphalt, propped my back against one of the huge wheels, and wept uncontrollably for ten minutes. A couple technicians roamed by and pretended not to see. And then it was out of me—I thought.